In Brent Leary’s Strategically Social: 5 Keys to Becoming a Social Business he dares to recommend using technology to semi-automate the social marketing process.

I applaud.

It’s about efficiency, after all.

“Automating routine operations frees up even more time that could be better spent focusing on finding ways to more meaningfully engage with customers.” (Leary)

Social media purists may get uppity at the suggestion of scheduling or triggering marketing activity on social platforms, but hey, we’ve all got businesses to run, and I want a holiday next summer. I’d rather focus on interesting client-facing activity than do boring ‘factory work’.

There are plenty of tools to support busy community managers who want time to be truly social. So let’s use them.

Image via Making the Modern World

I’ve lost count of the number of times people say they’ve had it with LinkedIn because they “get too many LinkedIn emails”. Change your LinkedIn Group email settings, people!

Filtering and managing the volume of LinkedIn email is a crucial if you want to remain sane. LinkedIn makes it easy to constrain and shape the email your receive.

However, let’s pause for a moment… Before adjusting the frequency and type of emails you receive (which is easy to do, trust me) the first thing to do is review your Group memberships. If you’re in a Group, but can’t remember why you joined, the time has come to cut and run.

“I refuse to join any Group that would have me as a member”

We all dip in and out of Groups, depending on what initiatives or industry sectors we need to know about. Time marches on, things change and those Groups become redundant.

There probably several ways to leave a Groups on LinkedIn, but here’s how I do it:

• Mouse over Groups in the navigation, click on Your Groups, and scroll to identify redundant groups.
• Click on a Group name and mouse over the More tab in that Group’s sub-navigation.
• Click on Your Settings, scroll down and look right for the grey ‘Leave Group’ button.

Leaving a Group a quite a long-winded process. I’d be interested to hear of any quicker method.

Assuming your Group membership is now aligned with your LinkedIn objectives, it’s time to adjust the amount and type of emails you get from those Groups:

• Mouse over your name and choose Settings.
• Click on Groups, Companies and Applications
• Click on Set the Frequency of Group emails and choose from the options.

Finally, refine your general LinkedIn Email Settings.

• While in the Settings page Find Email Preferences and work through the  options.
• The two most important ones (that constrain the volume of mail you receive) are Type of message and Frequency of message.

All done!

Image via My Atlas Moms

My dad passed away before Christmas. He was 86 and died of cancer — ‘old age’ as some have put it. Although our family had plenty of time to prepare for the inevitable, I found it almost unbearable… to watch him fade away over the last days, his arms making slow semaphore movements as we talked to him, unsure if he could hear us.

My mum, sister and I were at his bedside when he died. His breathing stopped and I felt a great surge of love flow through the room. I am not going to dwell on this personal loss, but it has affected me in all sorts of ways, one being that I’ve found it very difficult to write anything meaningful.

I did write my dad’s funeral eulogy, with help from all my sisters and brother, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. Since then I can’t seem to write. Along with music — a huge help over these last weeks — writing has always been important for me, so I am trying to start again, and maybe this post will be part of the process.

I am going to share this small detail from the eulogy. It gives an insight into the character of my wonderful dad.

As a teenager, I chanced upon my dad in the back room at our house, where he kept his books. He was sitting quite still. His eyes were shut and his head was bowed. A passer-by might have reasonably assumed dad was praying, except my father had no interest in religion, preferring the works of Karl Popper. Nevertheless dad sat there a very long time, unmoving. When at last he raised his head and opened his eyes, I asked him, “What are you up to, dad?” He waited a moment and blinked, his eyes adjusting to a new light, and said, “I was thinking, of course.”

Goodbye dad, I’m thinking of you.

I let out a hollow laugh when I received this LinkedIn InMail from a social media marketing trainer:

The sender — who works part time with a well-known marketing institute — has held down social media roles with several agencies, has 500+ connections and several glowing references. But he got his targeting badly wrong on this occasion. A cursory glance at my site would have told him that, no thank you, I don’t want any training in social media marketing.

We all make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. There will be more to come.

But I thought this example of a scatter-shot mailing serves to demonstrate how easy it is to do bad marketing. It’s not enough to excel at one aspect (such as social media) if you are going to utterly cock-up another (direct email marketing in this case). Rather, you need a rounded skillset to offer a confident marketing service.

Well, I suppose it’s only a question of time until I drop a similar clanger. Until then, adieu.

‘Buyer personas’ are archetypes of the people who have the biggest impact on your revenues and profit. Use this checklist to begin the process of creating a rich description of your ideal targets.

I am often surprised by senior executives who struggle to describe their target markets, segment by segment. The creation of buyer personas is a great way to get managers to focus on this basic marketing principle. This handy checklist will get you started:

The basics

1. Gender?
2. Age?
3. Marital status?
4. Children?
5. Geographic location?
6. Educational background?
7. What media consumed?
8. Drives what car?
9. Shops where?
10. How many holidays per year?

Work

1. Job title
2. Rank their influence on buying decisions
3. Who else in the business is involved in the buyer decision?
4. How profitable has this person been in the past?
5. Is she a repeat buyer?
6. What problems does he have on his desk TODAY?
7. What takes up their time?
8. What key initiatives are they working on TODAY? What is at stake if this goes wrong? What will reward be if it goes right?
9. What motivates or frustrates their work?
10. What single thing would make their work life better?
11. What ‘big win’ would they like to announce at the next management meeting?
12. What would make them look good in the eyes of their boss?
13. What hurdles do they jump to achieve their goals and metrics?
14. What process does this person go through when evaluating business purchases?
15. What are her/his views on the state of the industry/vertical?
16. What information resources do they rely on?
17. What communities, associations, networks does this person belong to?
18. What are the buyers’ highest priorities? Cost, speed, quality?
19. What ‘solution’ is the buyer currently using?
20. Why is the buyer not 100% happy with the current solution?
21. Is there any major change looming that will make your service irrelevant in the near- to mid-future

Personal

1. Non-work activities?
2. What do their photos and mementos (in their office) say about them?
3. Favourite sports or pastimes?
4. What is their personal passion?

Use this checklist in conjunction with the other posts in my short series on the power of buyer personas:

• Use buyer personas to hone your marketing messages
• How buyer personas help match problems with solutions
• How many buyer personas should I produce?

For anyone involved in digital marketing and the wider creative industry, there is a smorgasbord of talent on offer at this year’s Vision Bristol. Looking down the list of speakers I was struck by two short biographies nestling innocently together: Dr Bernie Hogan and Dan Southern.

Corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches?

Gratuitous stereotype of a nerdy academic

Dr Hogan is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and has a string of serious publications to his name (deep breath, eg… The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online).

With interests in social networks, human-computer interaction, social informatics and quantitative analysis, there is a clearly a lot of data-crunching and interpretation going on in his world.

As a fellow at Oxford, we should probably expect a talk based on empirical evidence, from a guy used to standing at the lectern in front of a bunch of students. But I suspect that is not the full picture. His tweets exhibit a wider range of interests and a playful nature.

Bleeding edge media specs and braces?

(Sort of) in contrast, Dan Southern operates from a super-cool region between media, publishing and marketing consultancy.

Largely irrelevant image of fictional 1950s ad-man Don Draper

His agency, Contagious — “the global marketing industry’s early warning system” — produces trend briefings and special reports for brands. I bet some of these are formulated partly with research done in social spaces using media measurement and monitoring tools.

It looks like Contagious mines the web for big name brands, digging out and interpreting information to keep clients ahead of the game. Smart stuff and once again probably involving a warehouse or two of data.

And there’s the rub…

I am guessing that these two will have a lot more in common than a first glance might suggest (based on their official and personal online presences.)

And this is why Vision promises to be a fascinating event for anyone involved in marketing strategy — particularly digital. Where else would your Venn Diagram intersect with such tip-top commercial and academic thought-leaders?

If you liked this you might like my post on The Undisputed Champion of Vision Bristol 2010.

More information: Vision blog  |  Speakers

Images lifted from backstage.blogs.com and blogs.villagevoice.com

Out of the blue I was asked to review a ‘gravity-defying phone holder’. The product is a lightweight desktop device, angled at about 45 degrees. Its face has a ‘sticky’ rubber coating to grip the reverse of your phone, holding it firmly, even at acute angles. This review is not so much about the product itself as the way it was marketed.

I was first contacted by telephone by ‘Carla’ from promotional gifts company ideasbynet. She gave a short description of the product and asked whether I would like to receive one. I agreed, knowing full well the idea was to get me and others to blog about it, creating awareness and link-juice to the company’s site. Fair enough. I had nothing to lose.

The product arrived. First impressions:

• A very 1980s-style desk-clutterer.
• An angular design.
• Made of brushed aluminium or lightweight plastic?

The ‘What? Gravity’ (terrible name) has a front face covered with a spongy rubberized material (this is where you stick your phone).

Sure enough my iPhone stuck to it. There is plenty of room to plug in a charger cable while a phone is resting on this device.

I occasionally use my phone with a headset while at my desk, so, theoretically, I could find it useful to have my phone raised up at an angle.  Unfortunately, when I try to punch numbers into the phone the What? Gravity moves around. This problem could have been solved with a much heavier construction, but I guess that would push up the unit cost a fair bit.

I will probably give this device to my eldest son. He’s got an iPod Touch and will love it.

Subsequently Carla emailed with a fairly laid-back follow up note. It includes links to the video you see here, plus a request to review the product. I didn’t feel under pressure to post, but thought the product marketing process I’d just been through interesting enough to do just that.

I’ve given the product a mixed review, but ideasbynet has achieved its ambition of a blog post including back links. Not a bad piece of content marketing, when you think about it…

Good targeting and segmentation are fundamental to effective marketing. The concept of the buyer persona neatly distils both into a useable tool. But how many buyer personas should you produce?

Make a list of your top buyer ‘types’. Take the three or five buyers that are ‘best’ for your business (buy the most, are most loyal, advocate for your brand, refer new business). Sometimes a fictitious name for each persona helps (e.g. Essex Man).

Ultimately you are looking for the people who have the biggest impact on your revenues and profit, but this could include people who influence buying decisions. Ignore customers who drain your resources.

Aim to write down 25 to 35 characteristics for each of your ideal buyer types.

Refer to these personas each time you begin marketing work.

In an earlier post I discussed how buyer personas help match your customers’ problems with your solutions.

The next post in this series features a handy checklist to help you create tightly-focused buyer personas.

I was delighted to take part in SPLASH last week. The event, organised and well-run by Working Knowledge, was for young people with dreams of earning a living from the thing they love: creative endeavour.

SPLASH aimed to demonstrate to students that a career can be forged in the creative industries… but that creative talent is just one part of the picture. Around 300 students took part. To assist, counsel and advise on the day, Working Knowledge drafted in 30-odd businesspeople (myself included). Our role as ‘experts’ was to:

• Raise the aspirations of students
• Build their confidence
• Share advice where relevant.

Advert: an introduction to social media for Bristol business

The students were given a scenario (essentially to propose marketing solutions to a new investment bank). Most students were in the 16-17 age bracket and were studying Art, Media, Fashion, Music, Graphic Design and Photography.

The student cohort ‘enjoyed’ a series of face to face encounters with the experts:

• An initial 12-minute meeting covering different areas of business
• Longer, interim presentations
• A Dragons’ Den judging panel.

I’ve got to say I was astounded at how these young people grew in confidence through the day, and how well they delivered their final pitches. There was a marked improvement in how students dealt with questions, how they took advice on board,  and how their creative ideas developed during the day.

“It was fun and interesting and gave me an insight into what to expect for the future.”

“I never used to talk out much but my confidence has now grown.”

“All of the experts were kind, friendly and approachable. They were very encouraging and gave really helpful advice.”
Student comments from SPLASH, 13 September 2011.

If I were recruiting staff, there were two or three students I would happily employ in the group I met.

Yes, I gave up a day of my time, but it was well worth it. Too often we get caught up in to-do lists, needless anxiety and tunnel vision when it comes to business. We forget the youthful thrill of believing we can do anything… can change the world. SPLASH brings some of that back.

To find out how you can contribute, contact @WK_Experts

A potential buyer weighing up choices will be influenced by the supplier that articulates its services best. These buyers are looking for evidence of a close match between their problem and the supplier’s solution.

Early in the buying process people look for and find written content, often online, as a next step after a peer referral. For example, a mid-level manager might find your content when producing a report for a senior executive; a business owner will Google your name after a referral at a networking event.

So the most effective marketing today is powerful content that simply and directly demonstrates the company’s ability to meet a buyer’s need.

Your marketing, sales and customer interactions will improve after you’ve documented an exact, complete view of your ideal buyers’ profile. Then use these buyer personas to guide every aspect of your marketing.

• Focus on what’s most important to your ideal buyers, one by one
• Stop creating non-specific, generic marketing and sales information
• Drill down to the essential info most valued by your ideal buyers.

This article, influenced by Adele Revella, is the second in a short series on buyer personas. The first shows you how to gain competitive advantage through deep insights into your target market.